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IMAutomator vs A Manual Social Bookmarking Service

IMAutomator is a software-based automated system and works quite differently to a manual social bookmarking service. What are the advantages and disadvantages of both?

What is a manual social bookmarking service?

A manual social bookmarking service is basically outsourcing the work of posting your bookmarks to real live humans. You would either give them details of your own accounts at the social bookmark sites to work with or they would use their own. You’d give them details of the bookmark(s) you wanted posted and they would do the work of logging into each site and posting the bookmark. The real key here is that it is a real live human being who physically does the work as opposed to a computer doing the work in the case of an automated social bookmarking system.

Lets look at some common issues that crop up and how they affect both the manual and automated systems.

Server Problems

Because social bookmarking is such a quick and effective way to build links, they often tend to be the targets of abuse – systems that create thousands of accounts at the site and then post thousands of copies of the same bookmark for example. This kind of behaviour can really take its toll on a server and many of the higher PR sites in particular that run on shared (not dedicated) servers can suffer from temporary outages where the site does not for a few minutes or hours at a time.

For a human who is making the submission this can be a real nuisance as he’d have to go back and revisit that site at a later time and keep track of what sites had been done and which hadn’t. Computers can get around this quite easily. IMAutomator has an automatic retry system built in – if there is some kind of server error that submission will be periodically retried several times over a period of 1-3 days.

CAPTCHA Solving

Almost all social bookmark sites these days require that a CAPTCHA be typed in as part of the submission process. These are put in place to prevent malicious systems from abusing the site in the ways mentioned above. They are designed to be difficult to read but recognisable by a human … but not a computer. So far, to my knowledge, computer artificial intelligence has not yet found a way to recognise these sophisticated graphics.

So you would think that only manual social bookmarking services could submit to sites that have a CAPTCHA? Well that may be the case for some other automated systems but IMAutomator has a fully automated CAPTCHA solving system built right into the software! How does that work? By outsourcing it to humans! There are many services now that allow you to submit an image and that is forwarded to human operators who solve the image and type in the contents and send it back to the originating computer for a small charge. IMAutomator makes use of one such service to solve all CAPTCHAS that are presented!

Bookmark URL Reporting

Most of the time, if you are using some kind of service for your social bookmark submissions then you have a lot of them to do. If you only had one or two bookmarks to post you’d probably just do it yourself! This is one area where manual social bookmarking services have the edge. A human being who posts a bookmark can easily see the created bookmark right in front of them, grab the URL and paste it into some kind of report.

Cost

Perhaps the biggest difference between manual and automated systems is the cost. Humans take time to do their work and have to make a living. Humans can only do so much work in a set amount of time so the cost is naturally high. You can expect to pay around $0.20 – $0.50 for each individual submission that is made using a manual service. However this is where automated systems like IMAutomator have the huge advantage as they can work infinitely faster than a human can! IMAutomator offers submissions from less than $0.01 each!! No manual social bookmarking service could ever match that price!

Lots of New Directory Sites Added

Directories tend to be a one-off submission type unlike bookmarking as for each website you can only submit the home page. However, the great benefit they offer is that many of the are quite high PR compares to bookmarking sites and they also tend to hang around for a long time.

We’ve been busy adding some new directory sites and have also added some search engines too (the submission process is exactly the same so it makes no sense to separate into two tools) and we’re now up to 26.

As this tool is just for Pro members, this is the time to make use of the Secondary Submissions tool if you have not done so already. If you already submitted your sites using the directory submitter in the past when we had fewer sites, you can re-schedule them using the Secondary Submissions tools and these will be submitted to all the new directory sites that we just added.

Is IMAutomator the Leading Social Bookmarking Service?

IMAutomator is a suite of tools that automates the process of building backlinks. The most popular of its submission tools is the social bookmark submitter but is IMAutomator really the leading social bookmarking service? Well, let’s have a look at some of the best features…

Huge Time Saver

Perhaps the single biggest benefit to IMAutomator is the sheer amount of time that it saves. It takes just seconds to submit your bookmark to IMAutomator and then you may choose to have that bookmark submitted to as many sites as you like, completely on auto-pilot. If you submit manually, at perhaps 1 minute each and you choose 30 sites to submit to, you are saving literally half an hour of your time on every single page you bookmark! Ask yourself how much is your time worth?

Fully, 100% Automated

You don’t have to set anything up, you don’t have to create accounts, you don’t have to enter CAPTCHAS, you don’t have to monitor your submissions – IMAutomator handles the entire submission from start to finish using its sophisticated submission engine. It is a truly fully automated, ‘submit-and-forget’ service. All you need to do is login any time you have new content to submit, enter the details of the job and you’re done!

Slowly Drip-Feed Backlinks Over Time

When you submit a job to IMAutomator, you choose the speed at which the individual submissions will be posted. If you like, you can have them all blasted out quickly over a 24 hour period but a better option would be to have them slowly drip-fed over time. the default speed setting is one link per day which is much more search engine friendly in most cases. After submitting the job, the submission schedule is created and then you can keep an eye on the progress of individual submissions at any time.

Spintax Support

IMAutomator has several submission tools, not just the social bookmarking submitter; at the time of writing there is also an article submitter, directory submitter and RSS feed submitter and all of them fully support spintax. You may enter on any or all of the text fields, using as many different groups as you like. IMAutomator will store your original spintax-encoded version as well as generating spun versions of each field. When the submission engine makes the submissions, each field is rotated around all the available spun versions allowing you to easily create unique versions for every individual submission.

So, Is IMAutomator the leading social bookmarking service?

I could write a lot more about the high success rates, randomized systems, free training provided but you get the idea. The question is, how does IMAutomator shape up for you as a social bookmarking service? Obviously, as the creator of IMAutomator I am highly biased in my opinion but I’ll honestly state that IMAutomator is not right for everyone! We do not allow adult submissions, the text for all jobs must be submitted in English and we only submit to English speaking sites. We manage the list of supported sites so you cannot upload lists of your own sites to submit to. We manage all of the accounts for you but that also means that you cannot submit using your own accounts.

If what you are looking for is a fast, easy, fully managed service that allows you to spend time on your business and not on your social bookmarking submissions then yes, we believe that we are the leading social bookmarking service currently available. But if you require more control, you have any adult or non-English content to submit then there are probably better solutions for you!

Fix to the Fix, Oops!

In our delight at fixing the mysterious bug that occasionally caused a bookmark submitted by Free / Light members to have less than 15 submissions we erroneously introduced a new bug which gave a rather blunt, “Error Submitting Bookmark”. This again, only occurred on fast submissions.

That has now been fixed also and we have also changed the way our trial sites are tested. We now simply add one randomly to a selection of submissions. That means sometimes you’ll have 15 and sometimes 16. For Pro members, this applies to you too so whatever the current total sites are, sometimes there’ll be an extra one for a trial site.

Reduced Submissions Bug Fixed

The bug we reported yesterday where some jobs occasionally have less than 15 submissions has been fixed. It was an obscure issue which only affected jobs that were submitted using the fastest submit option and only happened on a handful of jobs.

Unfortunately we cannot rectroactively fix the jobs that were affected in the past but all new submissions should work correctly now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Jobs with Less Than 15 Submissions?

All bookmark jobs submitted by Free or Light members should have at least 15 submissions for each bookmark. Sometimes they will have more if they are used to test out the sites that we have on trial but it should always be 15 minimum.

There seems to be a bug where some jobs are showing less than 15 but we’re having trouble tracking down exactly when this is occuring. It appears that the jobs are correctly being scheduled with 15 submissions when first entered and then ‘losing’ them some time later. I suspect this is to do with removing dead sites from the system but it is not clear at this stage.

If you see this happening, in particular if you notice it when you first enter a new bookmark, please do get in contact and let me know. Thanks for your help!

Two New Training Articles Added Today

It’s been a busy day today! We’ve just uploaded two new articles to the training page in the SEO section. This is good reading if you’ve just started using IMAutomator but you’re not sure how it affects your actual SEO efforts.

IMAutomator Light Now Available

Continuing from the announcement on Sunday that we’re replacing the Free version with a Light version, this Light version is now available and new members may no longer create a free account. What does this mean for existing members of the Free version?

First of all, you may continue to use your free account as normal for the next few weeks until the 6th February. This is the cut-off date. At this point, you will no longer be able to submit new bookmarks and all of your existing outstanding submissions will be suspended. We’ve implemented a ‘pause’ mechanism – they will simply be held in the system without being processed until you upgrade to the Light membership. When this happens, the submission times will ne re-calculated to resume the drip-feed effect in the same pattern as you originally specified.

Let me give you an example to make that a little clearer… Lets say you submit a bookmark with the default option of 1 link per day about a week before the cut-off. 7 of the 15 links get submitted but there are still 8 outstanding. You have not upgraded and your account is paused. The 8 submissions are still there but are not being processed. Some time later you decide to upgrade to the Light version. When this happens, your submissions will be unpaused and the submission dates will be re-calculated to continue submitting at a rate of 1 link per day. If we did not do this re-calculation, all the links would be submitted at once, which is not what we want.

New Features for Light Version

I’ve had a lot of feedback about the announcement to replace the free version with IMAutomator Light. A question I have been asked several times is whether or not the Light version will be getting any new features.

Initially the Light version will be exactly the same as what is now the free version but some of the new features in development – such as the spinning support (yes, we’ll release it eventually!) we had originally planned to make Pro only, but will be releasing to all members.

Fast Submit Option Disabled for Free Members

Following on from yesterday’s post, changes are underway for the IMAutomator Light version to be implemented. The fast submit option (all links in 1 or 2 days) has now been disabled for free members. It will be available to Light members which should be available in a day or two.